Petrograph Gallery

Friday, April 6, 2018

\DUSK AT MACLEISH

A Word and Image Installation of 7 Ecologically-inspired Graphic Poems by Naila Moreira and Pamela Petro, with live music by Natalie Sandstrom

8-9 pm, Friday April 13, 2018

Seelye Lawn, behind the Smith Museum of Art

This project is supported in part by a grant from the Northampton Arts Council, a local agency .

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Check out the new genre on the Lesley MFA in Creative Writing Program! It joins Creative Nonfiction (my genre!), Fiction, Poetry, Writing for Young People, and Writing for Stage and Screen. We'll be inaugurating it this coming June, 2018!

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

From the graphic poetry installation
"Dusk at MacLeish"

Poetry by Naila Moreira

Photographs by Pamela Petro

Photos of the installation on Seelye Lawn, behind the Smith College Art Museum, on

9 February, 2018 follow below. It was cold.

We'll show it again on 9 March, 13 April, and 11 May. Come out and see!

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Dusk At MacLeish is a digital installation of ecologically inspired "graphic poems"

that I'm creating at Smith College with poet Naila Moreira.

Her poems, my Dusk Series photos.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

A very belated Happy New Year from the Petrograph Gallery!

This is the New Year's card Marguerite and I sent out this year,

Inside it reads,

CHERISH CALM.

Please do!

We almost sent this image, composed of photos of fissures in beach
boulders at Schoodic Point, in Maine,

or this image, which is a composite of the fissures and a photo

of a door in Funchal, the chief city on the Portuguese island of

Madeira,

but couldn't think of what to say inside of either of them!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Schoodic Peninsula, Maine, July 2017

Hello from Maine's Schoodic Peninsula. I'd intended to add some new Dusk Series photos to the blog form here--and I've taken some--but this time it's the rock pools along the coast, especially at Schoodic Point, in Acadia National Park, that have filled my lens. The engagement of form and color at the heart of abstract painting is all here in the rocks. I've had a ball discovering it...

Artist's Statement

Petrographs are silver gelatin images printed on stone. My name—Petro—means rock in Greek. What a stroke of luck….

When natives of northeastern Siberia saw a view camera for the first time they called it, “a three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.”

Petrographs do the same thing. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows to the bedrock, they juxtapose the “snapshot” span of our mortal memories with the vastness of geological time. And that puts humans’ experience on earth back into perspective. We are not the planet’s masters. We’re just one of many species passing through deep time.

I grew up with rocks in the house—my father was a mineral collector—but I don’t make petrographs for keeps. After harvesting rocks from rivers, seabeds, and quarries, I coat them in photographic emulsion, print them with images from the human sphere, and return them to their original locations. Then time, water, sunlight, and weather do their erosive work as I record the process with my camera. The results, revealing the rocks as they’re distorted, obscured, and weathered by ever-shifting environmental factors, evoke in days the passage of years, and tether us to natural cycles of decomposition and replenishment. The installations, which scientists assure me have no ill-effects on their host eco-systems, are fleeting. Our images disappear, and the rocks return to their own silent business.

There is a Welsh word—hiraeth—that has no cognate in English. It suggests something akin to the “presence of absence,” and refers to a deep, and creative, longing for something unattainable that exists only in the imagination, possibly beyond place or time. In the case of Wales, a subject state since the 13th century, it derives from a longing for a national history that should have been but never was: a gap filled by myths, legends, and once-and-future yearnings.

Petrographs exist in the gap between human consciousness and the world around us. As our images erode in the sea or a river or under the snow, or the sun weathers and cracks them, their weathering enacts the presence of absence before our eyes: the hiraeth of the natural cycle. They insist that our lives are snapshot moments, and that we belong to the earth—that it is our home.

Petrographs’ insistence on our place in the natural order is a sometimes beautiful, occasionally unnerving reminder of how place shapes us—the rocks’ histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, ancient seas, fire, and ice, become miniature landscapes that give mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the environment.